Poetry

                      I’ve come a long way to the pulpit today to advance our causes: No more coal-mine canaries. Abolish Susan Jeffries who teases Max Biggins who sits on the seesaw and cries and cries. May she admit she wants to marry him; may the foremen confess that oft in the dark and brute weight of their…

I’m dumb about the world. To me, it always looks haunted, impoverished—especially in snow, which returns it to black and white. And sometimes I look and see nothing— but the elementary smoke rising from a human village, overpopulated, and yet undermade. A woman from there is walking along the side of the road to the…

                        have you been the unwinged thing perched and testing the phone-wire’s teeter? Have you weighed the big Pro against the many feath’ry Cons? Have you watched the brows of standers-below as they fell into wish from honest worry? Sometimes the wind off the lake sounds like a siren approaching your rescue, instead of the air…

Greek. 1. A traveled way; a road. 2. A traveler’s way; journey. The idea of a woman as a road has a certain appeal: I think of setting off along myself, boots sucking softly at the mud. The Greeks imagined the uterus hiking up and down. The booted empty uterus, sniffing for blood. And the…

I offer up this flowerbox my skull dear whomever let its luxuriance exceed its baseness let me curl in the blueblack root hairs and wait for you wind in my teeth will sough sweetly

The Inca gave the lightless places names. Fox, toad, serpent. A black llama with faint eyes. The space between my hands and the keyboard. I have forgotten how the sonata begins. Photo printed in black and white, so that the wine looks clear. The mirror in a dark room, waiting for monsters. In the city…

On a factory floor I felt for my keys. It was eight o’clock by the clock on the stall. (I meant to write wall) The tiles were one foot by one foot and sea foam green spoke the little shroud over the letters above the drill room door. Once it was useful to think of…

Chipped ivory, wire into the wall, a hole for headphones— This piano came from that one, the first piano, a dark wooden body we sheltered in, a father broad as an ark. I could float alone in it, go back and forth, E-flat, E, and slip between tipped sky and dirty penny taste in the…

The duende got into my head by the back staircase, a gypsy girl-child dressed in red with an old man’s face. My bedroom turned bitter cold. There were banging noises, loud knockings in between the walls. Things left their places. My comb crawled across the bureau, clicking like castanets. My grandmother’s ivory-backed mirror cracked itself…